The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

I tend to like things that already exist.

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.

I never wish for critics.

I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.

Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

One works without thinking how to work.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

I am not strong on perfection.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

Perhaps it's the people whose lives have taken sudden new twists - people who have learned to embrace the creative possibilities of change - who stand the best chance of penetrating life's mysteries.

The nation did not begin to realize the extraordinary possibilities of the vast Western territory until its attention was thus suddenly and definitely concentrated on the Pacific by the annual addition of over fifty million dollars to the circulating medium.

My parents gave me stability and a belief in myself and in all the possibilities life has to offer. I was told the only limitations I would ever face were those I placed upon myself.

Child prodigy is a curse because you've got all those terrible possibilities.

Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities.

The possibilities in sci-fi are wonderful. The subject is bigger than everything we know.

I believed totally in the possibilities implied in the series. I never thought of it as fantasy. Far from it.

And we will accept the creation of the Iberian Federation of a socialist republic which will give each region the right to construct its life in accordance with its economic possibilities and political preponderance.

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

So I, I knew something in a business sense about semiconductors and I appreciated their possibilities.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

If you love your life, you have to fight. If you believe in life and progress and possibilities, you have no choice.